At a recent travel marketing summit, the debate raged about the best mix between B2B and B2C marketing. The missing acronym, B2B2C is in its infancy. The business-to-business-to-consumer business model doesn't even have its own Wikipedia entry.
Yet Wikipedia itself is the one of the most successful user-generated content platform in the world. Almost 45 million entries created by people who are passionate about specific topics, with no financial remuneration. Similarly, Quora has 190 million regular users either asking questions or contributing answers on the estimated 500,000 topics. Again, all for no pay.
Monetisation of user-generated content is clunky. YouTube has armies of YouTubers who create authentic content and know how to edit it all together. They are rewarded through a advertising profit share arrangement. Yet in Instagram and Pinterest, there is no in-app monetisation available to the creative users. Instead, influencer marketing agencies sell paid posts based on inflated follower lists. This was one reason why the 6-second video blogging service Vine died: its users were not getting rewarded.
But by embracing the power of communities, we believe that we can bring back the tribal affinity that viners so loved. But, in creating Vloggi, our 10-second micro-video blogging tool, we also knew we had to also build in an equitable way of rewarding content creators.
So, we took remuneration of users seriously. Our platform works by building communities of videographers who work collaboratively on video projects. Anyone can contribute and anyone can use our self-assembly tools to merge the videos together into longer playlists. No editing is required, as we wanted to create a platform as easy to create collaborative videos as Wikipedia is to create encyclopaedia entries. Or Pinterest is to create themed boards. Below is a playlist put together by fans of street art, comprising multiple users' content.
We're targeting the travel industry first, because the ability to combine multiple locations without paying film crew expenses really appeals. Plus video reviews from real users have 20 times the value of branded content.
We all know the stats around video: it's expected to account for over 82 of all internet traffic by 2020. So the race is on to create millions and millions of videos.
What our platform does is put the power of creation back into the hands of consumers. End-users form communities with their peers and create video projects about their own passions. Marketers can also propose projects and set paid assignments. Our tools then make it really easy to combine multiple perspectives from multiple users into dynamic videos. All this content is available to licence, so marketing agencies can re-use without chasing IP rights. The content creator always gets at least 50% of the royalties.
By rewarding the content creators, we are following the sharing economy model of compensating people to use their own assets. The best example of this is Twitch.tv, where 1.7 million video gamers stream themselves playing games. Is that really a thing? Well, Amazon thinks so - it paid US$970 million for the service last year.
We are riding the wave of user-generated content, but we are also part of the new wave of C2B businesses. Come join us - it's about to blow.
